CP: Why can’t Minneapolis and St. Paul just get along? They are twins, after all.

RN: Sibling rivalry never dies, does it? Look at Ladies Mary and Edith on “Downton Abbey.” Polite, upper-class smiles on the outside, but beheath the surface? Seething disdain.

CP: Surely the bitterness between our two towns should have eased when a consensus was reached that Minneapolis was the favored twin. And that was in 1913.

RN: That was back when census figures were a near-violent point of contention. Today, I ask you if you can name the population of either burgh. Go ahead. I’ll give spot you 50,000 plus-or-minus.

CP: Uncle.

RN: Census data put Minneapolis at about 380,000, St. Paul near 288,000. That makes Minneapolis better, right? That’s how I felt when I was growing up in suburban Minneapolis in the 1970s. St. Paul might as well have been on Mars, such was the metro area’s deep psychological divide. Or at least the one in my imagination.

CP: How cruelly you ignore the Winter Carnival, St. Paul’s Bolshoi. I picture you running to Dayton’s in downtown Minneapolis as soon as you were tall enough to see over the Lancôme counter.

RN: You wager correctly. Meanwhile, you chose to attend college in St. Paul. Was that decision more about getting the heck out of Chicago, or answering the Saintly City’s siren call?